I think it is widely acknowledged that virtue ethics is perhaps easier to live by / more motivating / produces better incentives / etc, on an individual level, than trying to be a hardcore utilitarian in all your daily-life actions. And I agree with Stefan Schubert’s linked posts.
But when people look at morality from the perspective of what works best on an individual level, they miss some of the most advantageous things about utilitarianism as it pertains to EA:
Utilitarianism is a more legible framework that makes it easier for many people to debate, research, and learn under a common framework. It would be much harder to compare cause areas and debate intervention effectiveness if we didn’t have a roughly utilitarian framework. Having a roughly utilitarian mindset thus allows the existence of EA as a community/movement.
Utilitarianism often seems awkward and unnatural on the scale of individual / interpersonal moral decisions—am I really going to crank through the ethical calculus before deciding what to eat for dinner, or how I should behave towards a friend? But on societal-level “policy” questions, utilitarianism starts to feel much more natural. “Should preventative treatment of heart disease with statins be recommended to demographic group X?”—with medical questions like this, it seems kind of crazy to do anything other than weigh the costs and benefits of each option, and pick the one with the highest expected value in life-years. “What is the optimal system of taxation?” will involve some fundamental value judgements (who “deserves” to have more vs less, which activities should be encouraged vs discouraged), but also a lot of utilitarian-style economic arguments about what will maximize growth and avoid creating weird distortions.
With both the EA movement and all kinds of other institutions (like governments making policy decisions), utilitarianism is of outsized importance because it improves “reasoning transparency” and makes organizations more flexible and persuadable. It is often easier to argue and build broad agreement about the consequences of some course of action, than it is to establish which course of action is more virtuous. Adopting a utilitarian framework encourages institutions to publicly explain their decisionmaking, and thereby showcase the cruxes where, if their minds were changed on issue X, they would switch from working on cause A to cause B.
Other moral systems, like virtue ethics, seem like they might be kind of blind to one of the core ideas of EA—that some well-targeted actions and cause areas might be 100x the impact of other, similar-seeming ones, and therefore we should make a big effort to search for those impacts with a “hits-based” approach.
For a variety of reasons (in part, because I feel I am too selfish), I don’t personally identify as a utilitarian. (Albeit I am definitely more utilitarian-adjacent than most people!) But I think that utilitarianism is often underrated because people always consider it on an individual level, not appreciating the societal level where utilitarianism often seems most relevant.
I think it is widely acknowledged that virtue ethics is perhaps easier to live by / more motivating / produces better incentives / etc, on an individual level, than trying to be a hardcore utilitarian in all your daily-life actions. And I agree with Stefan Schubert’s linked posts.
But when people look at morality from the perspective of what works best on an individual level, they miss some of the most advantageous things about utilitarianism as it pertains to EA:
Utilitarianism is a more legible framework that makes it easier for many people to debate, research, and learn under a common framework. It would be much harder to compare cause areas and debate intervention effectiveness if we didn’t have a roughly utilitarian framework. Having a roughly utilitarian mindset thus allows the existence of EA as a community/movement.
Utilitarianism often seems awkward and unnatural on the scale of individual / interpersonal moral decisions—am I really going to crank through the ethical calculus before deciding what to eat for dinner, or how I should behave towards a friend? But on societal-level “policy” questions, utilitarianism starts to feel much more natural. “Should preventative treatment of heart disease with statins be recommended to demographic group X?”—with medical questions like this, it seems kind of crazy to do anything other than weigh the costs and benefits of each option, and pick the one with the highest expected value in life-years. “What is the optimal system of taxation?” will involve some fundamental value judgements (who “deserves” to have more vs less, which activities should be encouraged vs discouraged), but also a lot of utilitarian-style economic arguments about what will maximize growth and avoid creating weird distortions.
With both the EA movement and all kinds of other institutions (like governments making policy decisions), utilitarianism is of outsized importance because it improves “reasoning transparency” and makes organizations more flexible and persuadable. It is often easier to argue and build broad agreement about the consequences of some course of action, than it is to establish which course of action is more virtuous. Adopting a utilitarian framework encourages institutions to publicly explain their decisionmaking, and thereby showcase the cruxes where, if their minds were changed on issue X, they would switch from working on cause A to cause B.
Other moral systems, like virtue ethics, seem like they might be kind of blind to one of the core ideas of EA—that some well-targeted actions and cause areas might be 100x the impact of other, similar-seeming ones, and therefore we should make a big effort to search for those impacts with a “hits-based” approach.
For a variety of reasons (in part, because I feel I am too selfish), I don’t personally identify as a utilitarian. (Albeit I am definitely more utilitarian-adjacent than most people!) But I think that utilitarianism is often underrated because people always consider it on an individual level, not appreciating the societal level where utilitarianism often seems most relevant.
Nice comment, you make several good points. Fwiw, I don’t think our paper is conflict with anything you say here.
Agreed!